In response to immigration raids by masked federal officers in Los Angeles and across the nation, two California lawmakers on Monday proposed a new state law to ban members of law enforcement from concealing their faces while on the job.
The bill would make it a misdemeanor for local, state and federal law enforcement officers to cover their faces with some exceptions, and also encourage them to wear a form of identification on their uniform.
“We’re really at risk of having, effectively, secret police in this country,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), co-author of the bill.
This needs to happen, but
We’re way past this. Without due process, without judical oversight, without identification… we’re deep into actual secret police disappearing human beings off the street.
We absolutely need to ban them from hiding their identities while “serving” the public, but at this point we need to outright ban them from the state. Senators and comptrollers being arrested, lawmakers being killed, chaos in the streets…
Any state with any hope left of resisting the wave of fascism needs to outlaw ICE from having any jurisdiction within their borders. ICE detaining a human should be litigated and prosecuted as a kidnapping, because that’s exactly what it is. “It’ll start a war,” you might say. No it fucking won’t. It will either prevent a war, or the war has already started.
Banning it/them simultaneously goes too far and not far enough. Instead, explicitly legalize self-defense against anyone that fails or refuses to identify and validate their identity while performing official activities. Turn hiding your face and badge number into literal suicide.
This just starts the war directly between civilians and ICE, and it still doesn’t address the underlying problem, which is that - masked or not - ICE agents are taking people off the streets and shipping them overseas to die, all without any oversight. The due process is still skipped over entirely. They might take the masks off, but the concentration camps will keep growing.
At the very least, they need to ban ICE agents from detaining anyone without a judicial warrant. These “administrative” warrants and blatantly racist stop-and-frisk ambushes need to stop.